Fintan Dunne Reports, and our take on improvements

Folks, a very good and very positive report from our friend Fintan Dunne can be found here:

HEROIC JAPANESE WIN BATTLE WITH NUCLEAR PLANT

Mr. Dunne's serious, thoughtful, studied and careful coverage of this event has been one of the pinnacles of achievement in the media coverage in total, and both he and I shared the notion that the Japanese had every chance to prevail in this situation without a massive reactor accident.

I must add that the consistency of the plants' condition has been noted on this blog very recently; Secretary Edano has made a cautiously optimistic statement that the situation seems stabilizing and moving forward; and Mr. Dunne and his quoted source article material from the Wall Street Journal are in line.

We are by NO MEANS out of the woods yet. In fact, the total event timeline for this accident will run decades.. and I'll get into that in another post later on when I begin to describe the various options for dealing with these plants once the conditions I described for safety are accomplished and the plants can be made first operable and then inhabitable. The recovery is not going to move forward until the plants can be controlled from the control rooms, which must be clean and not in a rad area; the containments and buildings must be rebuilt to allow the necessary work to recommence, or at least partially demolished to allow access for the necessary work.

However, and what I'm really trying to get at here, the likelihood of any further major damage to the installed reactor cores at No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 plants seems less and less probable and it seems as if within about 12 hours there will be overall control possible of the spent fuel pool situations in No. 3 and No. 4 plants. These five zones -- three installed cores, two spent fuel pools -- really are the focus of the entire huge orchestration of events at the Fukushima Daiichi site and we're able to look positively on the trends at all of these at the moment.

8:30 PM Eastern Saturday 3/19
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW